Get Amplified
Podcast series GET AMPLIFIED where we’re going to be talking about everything to do with working in the tech industry from staying ahead of the pace of change to fulfilment and well-being.Hosting the series will be Sam Routledge former CTO at Softcat who will be joined by Vicky Reddington from the Amplified Group. The team will be joined by leaders in the tech industry who will share their stories. We are going to share things we wish we knew 20 years ago. This is not rocket science but, we are going to highlight many of the things we do subconsciously and with a more conscious approach, done with intent and purpose can be hugely impactful. We will break it down and make it practical! Like everything we do at the Amplified Group, we will keep it real, it will be relevant and it will be lively!
Get Amplified
“Tech competition is time-based: Why alignment and purpose are critical.” Paul Wiefels Co-founder Chasm Group
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What if your biggest competitive advantage, isn’t your product?
In this episode of Get Amplified, we’re joined by Paul Wiefels, Managing Director and co-founder of The Chasm Group, and a master of go-to-market strategy in the tech industry.
And he doesn’t hold back.
Paul challenges one of the biggest assumptions in tech: that better product wins. In reality? The gap between competitors is often tiny “not more than 10 cents worth of difference.” What really separates winners is how fast and effectively they go to market.
We get into:
- Why tech is now a time-based competition, and what that actually means
- How alignment and purpose become your biggest accelerators
- Why aligning and motivating your troops is key to success
- The real reason great products still fail to win
- And what leaders should be focusing on right now to move faster
We discuss how speed doesn’t come from pressure, it comes from clarity, alignment, and everyone pulling in the same direction.
Paul also touches on the technology adoption lifecycle and the infamous “chasm,” brought to life in Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, and why it’s still just as relevant today.
If you’re in a market where products look increasingly similar (and you’re wondering how to actually win) this episode is a bit of a wake-up call.
This is a not to be missed episode.
As Paul says, “Tech is very mainstream now. We are no longer mystified by technology . . . Tech companies are always fighting in a time-based competition . . . Nowadays there’s not more than 10 cent worth of difference in tech in the same category. How you take things to market is just as important as what things you’re taking to market. How you’re organising your troops inside the company is even more important than it was previously.”
Further Info
Paul talks about the technology adoption lifecycle and describes ‘the chasm’ which is detailed in Geoffrey Moore’s well regarded book, Crossing the Chasm.
If you enjoyed this one, we think you’ll love our conversation with Geoffrey Moore: A Chicken Can Only Lay One Egg At a Time
We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn!
https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/
Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders who want to help their companies execute faster. As always, we're virtual. I'm at home in Buckinghamshire. Vicki's in deepest darkest Oxfordshire. Hang on a minute. Vicky, where's Sia?
VicAh. So Sia has followed her heart and she's gone back into the corporate world. And she has absolutely promised us that she's going to come back and talk to us on Get Amplified about how she's taken everything that she's learnt with everything that we've done at the Amplified Group and she's now putting it into practice. So we wish her the very best of luck and uh we miss her dearly, but we need to crack on.
Speaker 1We do indeed, and it'll be great to have her back on the on the on the podcast in the very, very near future. So, what's today's opic, Vicky? And who have we got on the show?
VicSo today we are very fortunate to have Paul Wiefels on the podcast. And Paul is from the Chasm Group. And when I was talking to one of my clients that we had you on the on the show, Paul, he said, uh, is that the Chasm group? And then he went to his cupboard and brought out the very famous book and said, uh, you mean the guys that created this? And I'm like, yes, that's absolutely it. So it's an absolute privilege to have you on the show today. So what we're going to talk about is why tech companies are in a time-based competition and why purpose and alignment are critical for success. And I can't think of anyone better qualified to talk about this than Paul.
Speaker 1Thanks, Vic. So, Paul, do you want to start maybe give us a little bit of a high-level career history, where you've been, what you've done?
Speaker 2Sure. I originally, when I came out of graduate business school, uh, went to work for the advertising industry or in the advertising industry for a couple of um big global ad agencies, and uh quickly discovered that um there were other things to do besides that, uh, perhaps on the client side, and I had the good luck to be recruited by a very small company in Cupertino called at the time Apple Computer. And so I joined Apple uh back in its fledgling days as their advertising manager and uh worked at Apple in various roles all within marketing uh over the next seven years, both in Apple's domestic uh or US operation as well as their international operation. Um and so uh I left uh Apple in the late 80s and joined uh then the number two independent relational database company, a company called Ingress, where I was head of product marketing and Ingress was sold, and um I left Ingress not really knowing what to do, but I had had a good friend of mine who had previously been the creative director at Apple, who was now working at Landor Associates. Landor is one of the biggest global branding firms in the world, and they brought me over and said, maybe you can get us more business in the high-tech industry, which I attempted to do. And Geoffrey Moore, my original co-founder, rang me and said, Hey, I wrote this book. Uh well, I had known that he'd written the book because I was one of his editors. So I remember looking at a manuscript for crossing the chasm as I was on a flight actually from London to Sydney, and this thing was in a in a white binder, three-hole binder. And I was looking through it and putting notes on it. And um I said, Well, you know, there's a book in here someplace. It's not this, but but they're, you know, this is not bad, Jeffrey. Um and so Jeffrey uh proceeded to clean it up because he's a brilliant writer, and he called me one day and he said, Look, I just left Regis McKenna, which is uh at the time was one of the kind of premier marketing PR agencies in in Silicon Valley. And I've got a client, and and I've I've put material around this crossing the chasm stuff where we can actually kind of teach teams to do it, and uh, you know, maybe maybe we should talk about that. And I said, sure, because I'm certainly hating what I'm doing. So we did that and we talked about it over his kitchen table. And I said, Well, you know, we can kind of do this until we have to get real jobs again, right? He said, Yeah, that sounds good, and off we went.
Speaker 1And the rest is history, I suppose.
Speaker 2We still haven't gotten real jobs, but you know, this has been all up.
Speaker 1I say the same thing. So I joined SoftCat straight out of uni, and I initially did it for to get a year's worth of sales experience before going and getting a real job, and very quickly it became a real job, and I was it never felt like a real job, but it certainly was at the time, and 20 odd years later, and and and the and the rest is history, I suppose. I wonder what became of that Apple company that you worked for in the early days. You know, I don't know.
Speaker 2I I they're still down there. Um uh, you know, they're still down in Cupertino.
Speaker 1Um maybe they'll make something of themselves one day.
Speaker 2Quite a quite a yeah, I I I think they actually uh they actually do, uh they actually turned out all right.
Speaker 1Okay, that's good. That's good stuff. That's good stuff.
VicUm and you know, I I should say I was very, very fortunate to to work with Paul, I think it was probably around 2002, Paul, um, when I was at Citrix. So I've known Paul a long time, but I also am incredibly grateful to him because we have to credit Paul for the fact that we are not called tribal wahoo as we almost were, and are called the Amplified Group, because Paul and I met for dinner when we were first really conceiving the uh the Amplified Group, and I mentioned to him that we'd come up with this term tribal because that's what we thought we were about, and we were thinking about adding Wahoo onto the end of it, and he said, Vic, you really can't do that. Go and listen to Christina Aguilera singing about this, and then you'll realize you really can't use it. So, Paul, I'm eternally grateful to you for the fact that we've now got a grown-up name and you steered us in the right direction, as you have with with many other things. So, thank you again for for being here and sharing this with us.
Speaker 4Happy can free written.
Speaker 1Fantastic. So, Paul, do you want to tell us a little bit more about the chasm group and what they do for people?
Speaker 2So, the chasm group was originally formed, as I said, around these principles that Jeff had written about in Crossing the Chasm. And what crossing the chasm, Crossing the Chasm was a was a um was a bellwether book in high technology, um, because it was the first real book, business book, that described fairly accurately how people adopt things, uh, specifically uh tech-based things, uh, how's that for a technical term, that are uh discontinuous or disruptive. That is, they're different from the status quo. And to be fair, the work, uh what we later came to call the technology adoption lifecycle really came out of work that was done by a social scientist, Everett Rogers, here in the States, back in the 40s. And he had really traced the adoption of uh, among other things, new farming techniques and built a bell-shaped curve, which was the distribution model for how everything's a bell curve, right? Everything is a bell curve, yep, with standard deviations off of a mean. And he gave names to people, um, you know, early adopters, late adopters, laggards, etc., and we repurposed that. But we repurposed it with a difference, and that difference was this period that we call the chasm. And that is the kind of um what we call a no man's land, if you will, between the adoption of what we call technology enthusiasts and visionaries, that is to say, the very early adopters of a technology, and what we came to call pragmatists and conservatives, uh, not the political party, but um to describe early and late majority followed by laggards, which we don't really pay much attention to. And we postulated that all of the things that you needed to do in the early part of that market, technology enthusiasts and visionaries, would have to be, for the most part, reversed when you went after mainstreamers. And that was very disconcerting to companies because they looked at this bell-shaped curve of adoption as continuous. That is to say, if I just win these first two groups, it will lead me into the promised land. Obviously, under the bell-shaped curve, there's a lot bigger numbers there. It will lead me into this promised land. And it didn't. We would see time and again uh innovations do very, very well at the outset and then stall out. And the phone at the time, the phone started ringing, and people were buying this book and they were calling and they said, That's just like me, or that's just like us. Or in my last company, we had the same thing happen. Oh my gosh, you guys have figured it out. And we said, Well, we haven't figured it out, we've just described it, but we think we know how to address it. And so our practice began to develop around those ideas. Jeffrey, being a very prolific author, then followed it up with a book that was called Inside the Tornado, which came out in the 95-96 timeframe. And that uh described a moment of hypergrowth, which we call the tornado, and followed by a couple of other books where we really started to now expand the IP beyond just this curve into other areas, other challenges that we felt technology companies faced. And uh our practice broadened, our practice got larger, and it in some cases uh began to resemble more a I don't want to say traditional management consulting, because we yeah, we did not want to be that, and we do not want to be that to this day. But all problems could not be described by this magic bell-shaped curve. And so um, as as kind of a co-founder, I said, you know, we're we're in the business of solving people's problems, helping them solve their problems, building alignment around the solution to that problem. And so we're going to offer what we think is in service to that goal.
VicCan I just interrupt for a second? And um, you've been just a little bit quiet on the fact that you actually also have brought out an authored book. You didn't talk about it.
Speaker 2Well, yeah.
VicNo modesty, please.
Speaker 2So after crossing the chasm and tornado came out, we were getting more and more questions, I guess, about well, that's great. You've you've described how to do this and you've you've been somewhat prescriptive on what to do, but we would like a lot more detail. And so I wrote a book called The Chasm Companion, which was intended to be the field book for crossing the chasm inside the tornado, etc. And the Chasm Companion was a real how-to book. So it broke down these curves, it broke down the segments within these curves, and it started to address what we call the market development strategy framework, better known as the nine-point checklist. And in those elements, we postulated that nine things really were the things that determined effective market strategy, and you didn't really need to know a tenth thing. So Chasm Companion dives into each of those things and is, in a sense, a big toolbox. And I'm currently in the process, I've threatened it before, but I'm getting enough requests that um I'm gonna rewrite it.
VicBut there's so much great content in there, Paul. And certainly from my perspective and how much I learned from you in those early days, we talk at the Amplified Group of what we do and turning it into muscle memory so that it's constantly used. And you know, I I go back to the book and it's great to see it reinforces that I'm doing the right things because you help me build that that muscle memory.
Speaker 2Well, thanks. Uh it's it's the book is too long. When I read it, I'm absolutely appalled by it. It's too long, and the concepts are right, the examples are obviously out of date.
Speaker 1It's never fun marking your own homework, though, is it?
Speaker 2Yeah, no, it is, it really isn't. It's it's just it's like I wrote that phrase, I wrote that program. God, that's just awful.
Speaker 1Uh you know, I'm I'm absolutely the same with that. And with uh you know, writing proposals and documents and all that sort of stuff, I would always get somebody else to proofread it, you know, and you can never proof your proofread your own stuff. And I and I can't stand you know listening back to these podcasts or watching myself play when I'm on stage with a band. Or you know, I I I love it when I'm doing it, but I can't go back and listen to it or watch myself or some of the things.
Speaker 2So that's that's what made Jeffrey such a Jeffrey was such a uh is such a prolific author because he always turned out his stuff to other people, notably me, to prove it. Whereas you really have a co-writing credit on Yeah, I was the kind of writer who would write three pages and then go back and edit two.
Speaker 1Yeah. So Ricky, I can see why you uh you wanted us to have Paul on the uh on the podcast that much is is clear. Um do you want to give us a bit of context behind the topic?
VicWell, it's really because um last time Paul and I met, he was talking about a client that he was working with, and he was saying, you know, I've got the way we've been working together. I you know, in terms of the process that we need to go through, we've done the things that we need to do with them, but it still comes down to the human interaction and how people are working together, and that just seemed to fit really nicely with with what we do and and and how we bring people along. And the fact that even you know, even the messaging on the Casom Groove's website now is it's it's about alignment and it's about everybody pulling in the same direction, and that's such a critical piece to to get right. So that's why I wanted to get Paul's perspective on it.
Speaker 2Well, the world of high technology are now technology-based companies. The good news is that technology is very mainstream now. I mean, it we we are no longer no longer mystified by technology, no, no longer, just to use the phrase blinded by science. I mean, there's still companies and still people that operate that way. But, you know, I mean, this this thing, this iPhone that I'm holding up, um, you know, has more compute power in it than uh the launch uh vehicle that landed on the moon. You know, when you think about that, it's kind of well, that's that's pretty interesting, but nobody's really fascinated by that anymore. At the same time, the technology-based industries are high-risk, low data industries. By that I mean the the answer is not going to be always in the data. There are going to be elements of risk that you're going to have to assume in order to get your product, your service to market and get it there quickly, because this is a time, you know, it tech uh uh technology companies are always fighting in a time-based uh competition. Can can my guys who write code, just to use an example, beat the guys down the street who write code? And uh can my company beat the guys down the street because uh they're less aligned. We can't really say that these are different companies because in this industry, as you well know, Vicky, you know, I worked for those guys down the street, right? And so I didn't suddenly increase my IQ when I came over to the company that is now, you know, that that is my new company. Rather, that new company is better aligned in what they're going to do, how they're going to do it, why they're going to do it, and when they're going to do it than the company that I came from. And that that's why I describe this as partially a time-based competition. Um, it it's heretical to say, but I will say it, um, not being shy, uh, nowadays there is not more than, shall we say, 10 cents, 10p worth of difference between one technology and another in the same category. I mean, there just isn't. Um, there used to be. There used to be significant differences, but now less so. And so how you take things to market is just as important as what you're taking things to market. And how you're organizing your troops inside the company is even more important than it was previously.
Speaker 1That makes sense to me. Actually, you know, if I look at some of the infrastructure stuff that we used to do at Soft, well, still do at SoftCat. Um yeah, in the early days of doing data center stuff, you'd buy a storage area network from one vendor because it had certain features and functionalities that would solve a problem. Like so NetApp had snapshots and somebody else would have had replication and and and so on. And eventually that stuff became what I call table stakes. You know, everybody's got a flash layer, everybody's got blazing fast IOPS, everybody's got this, that, and the other. Um so yeah, you're picking it on you know, commercial, what appeals to you, what your install base is, you know, a lot more than just the tech, it's really interesting. I I heard what what you were saying uh about tech at the minute, but I heard Pat Gelsinger, um the now Earthwell CEO of VMware, describe it as tech is breaking out of tech. You know, it's not just about um the speeds and feeds and the stuff that it's it does. It's it's tech going into the wider business and actually changing the world. And in in that context, what you see is the opportunity for tech at the minute.
Speaker 2Well, I think just taking that and kind of parsing that sentence a little bit or parsing your question a bit, you have to kind of go back and to the statement that I made previously is that tech is now mainstream. One of the reasons that I was hired at Apple way back when is because I had learned marketing in consumer package goods. I was working for an ad agency, but the ad agencies that I was working on had clients that were consumer package goods clients. And you know, that that is where modern marketing started. I'm talking Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Colgate Palm Olive, et cetera, et cetera. And so I brought to Apple a discipline in marketing that simply wasn't there, me and several other people, that simply wasn't there in technology companies. Tech companies tend to run by, speaking of Pat Gelsinger, either engineers or salespeople. And marketing is always sort of uh when it's done poorly and when it's organized poorly, it's it's uh marketing is the pool that runs between those two groups trying to adjudicate, you know, what each is doing. And that's not the way to operate a modern-day technology company. So things have gotten a lot better, but there are still issues associated with bringing things to market in a world where technology is not the differentiator per se, but rather a whole list of things is what differentiates you and your company. That is what companies oftentimes still struggle with.
VicAnd it's it's really interesting. There's two points I want to pick up on there. One, so Sam used to work at SoftCat, and I'm I think I mentioned to you Paul when we spoke last, we had Colin Brown on, who took SoftCat from being 100 million to just under 2 billion. And they were they're an IT reseller for a simple term. And Colin says our differentiation was our people. And I think that's a very simple example, but but something else I just wanted to pick up on is last time we spoke, you said Victor, what's your problem statement? As in what are we trying to do at the Amplified Group? And in listening to everything that came out of Mark Templeton's podcast about breaking the glass ceilings of growth and him talking about the inertia creeping in. My internal statement is um is how do you stop that inertia creeping in? But actually, what I've just heard there is it's actually about speed to market by getting Everybody aligned. That's what we that's what we that's what we do. That's the problem statement.
Speaker 2Yeah, and and and that's that's the the um I mentioned about this low data, you know, high risk. We very much subscribe to the theory that we are never trying to get anything 100% right, right? I mean, not even close. I'll take 75% right because, first of all, there's inherent risk in this anyway. Number two, if I can get 75% right and get and launch in a quarter when it takes my clients, competitors six to eight months to do the same thing, I'm way ahead of the game. Right? And this is where you know, big companies, the larger and larger and larger they get, the more adverse to risk they are. And that that inertia creeps into big companies just like rust will creep into your your metal gate outside, you know, if you don't look after it. I mean, it just happens. And that inertia is absolutely uh killer to an organization that ostensibly is trying to be, in quotation marks, agile, but can't because it it's lost its sense of purpose or it's lost its sense of alignment around what its primary mission is. And and Apple back in the in the um in the late 80s, and Microsoft went through this as well. You can tell when a company is starting to go through this, the company is spending more time doing internal presentations to each other than they are doing presentations to the marketplace, or better yet, even listening to the marketplace.
VicYeah. 95% of my job at VMware was internal, and the 5% and the highlight was working with the Partner Advisory Council, which is where I met Sam. That was that was like heaven to me at VMware.
Speaker 2And always had a metric for a company when we walked through the halls of the company. Remember that? Um we'll be there again. But uh our our simple metric was Jeffrey came up with the metric of when I look in the cubicles and I see a lot of uh the American cartoonist Dilbert. Yeah. Um, written by Scott Adams, who's who's who who was a tech guy, right?
Speaker 1And speaks the truth.
Speaker 2Yeah, and the more Dilbert cartoons that were posted up on the cubicles, the sicker the company was, or the more dysfunctional the company was. That was Jeff's metric. My metric was a little different. I would walk into a company, and the more posters I saw that had come out of the HR department around values, around alignment, around this, that, and the other thing, the more posters I saw on the wall, the more dysfunctional that company was.
Speaker 1So, what should big companies, big tech companies, particularly those in that that hypergrowth phase, be thinking about?
Speaker 2Well, it two different ideas there, Sam. If you're in hypergrowth phase, likely you're not big. You're trying to get a good point.
Speaker 1You're you're on your way to bigger at least, you hope.
Speaker 2You're trying to get big, right? So the challenges that we see to companies that are in hyper uh or trying to meet these next big goals. You know, I'm a I'm a $50 million company trying to get to a $200 million company. I'm a $200 million company trying to get to a $500 million company, etc. Part of these challenges are can we adapt our processes? Can we adapt how we go to market in such a way that we are not getting trapped by inertia? Uh, we call that, by the way, core and context. Can we keep repurposing our focus around core? And I'll describe what I mean by that in a minute, and keep extracting context away from our organization. And let me describe core and context in a very simple way. Core is are those sorts of activities that when you do them well, they make a difference. They advance your valuation, they advance your share price, they advance your cause. And when you do them poorly, they retard that cause. Context are those sets of activities and processes that you do, that when you do them well, you maintain a status quo of sorts. But when you do them poorly, you diminish that status quo. And the way that I used to describe this to people, uh, and in fact still do, when my son was, I don't know, 12 years old or so, go into his bedroom. You know, it looks like a hurricane has gone has gone through it. Uh, clean up this room, okay.
VicSam and I have both got 12-year-olds, Paul. So we we we get that.
Speaker 2I feel your pace. You know, you need to get your room clean, okay? Sorted out. Well, why, Dad? It's just it's my room. I'll just shut the door. He's like, yeah, but it's my house, okay. And I I I know what's going on here, and and you know, this is disorganized rooms are decides signs of disorganized minds, which of course a 12-year-old isn't really going to pick up on. Well, what do I get for it? And the answer is nothing. Okay, you don't get anything for it, you get to continue to live here. We will reward you when you bring A's home on your report card. Okay, that's core. Keeping your room clean is context, and young companies um have the the uh advantage of being mostly all core. Now, by the way, context things are things that need to be done, those are hygiene factors that need to be done, but they don't need to be done better than whatever the hygiene standard is, whereas core does. And over time, what happens to companies, what happens to organizations is that their core context ratios start to even out and approach one, and that's a problem. And when companies start to grow like that, or when they they start to get that uh in that situation, there they've lost again this notion of what is my organizing purpose? Why do I have so much stuff devoted to context, and my core is now suffering, and I now can't grow. So, back to your question, hyperscale companies keep their eye on that core context idea. Big companies oftentimes have to go through a period where they shed context. And um, you know, the the the the um we're a company, um the chasm group is a company that focuses on core, right? We want to build up the numerator, right? The growth side, and we'll let the denominator kind of take care of itself. I would contrast that with a lot of the big management consultancies who are, I would argue, in some ways are context driven. We will we will come in and get rid of all your context.
VicWe can identify that.
Speaker 2Yeah, we can identify context and we'll get rid of it, and we'll get rid of it, you know, quite smartly.
VicThat makes loads of sense.
Speaker 2Yeah, I like that. I like that.
Speaker 1So you've been doing this for 20 years. What's changed?
Speaker 2Longer than that.
Speaker 1Okay, 20 20 plus years.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1I was being kind.
Speaker 2Let's just leave it at that, Sam.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2Uh well, I think what's changed uh again, back to what I referenced previously, the industry is a lot more mature now, the the technology industry. Now, and it's it's never been more more vibrant, quite amazing, really. I just I just can't see any any uh uh any flattening out of the tech industry from now through the rest of my lifetime. I've done a tremendous amount of work in biotech back in the 90s, gene sequencing and and what have you. I've worked for virtually every biotech company, certainly on in California and some in Boston. And uh we see the advantages of those, the the the benefits of that technology come to fruition 15 years after it's invented. And that is the rapid sequencing of the coronavirus and the ability to create vaccines in under a year that have a you know 90 plus efficacy. That's just staggering. We are now in the world of AI and ML, artificial intelligence machine language that will be attached to everything. I still don't want it in my refrigerator, but you know, call me a Luddite. We are in we are in version two of a 10-year profound existential change called digital transformation. And the first round, we we believe that this is a 20-year cycle, at least. Uh, we have now completed 10 years of it, and the next 10 years are going to be even more profound and probably harder to do because we start to get into marginal rates of return to some of those activities. So that's what's changed. The what hasn't changed, unfortunately, is that from a market development market strategy, in some senses corporate strategy, kind of where I live, uh, we still see our share of really bad ideas. Bad ideas in the sense that I don't understand what you're trying to say here. I don't understand what you know, there's a million companies in your category. Why are you different? Well, because we have fenestrated Shrivastats with this, this, and this, you know, all of this tech battle, and it's like, so you know, what is your why? I still have difficulty getting clients to tell me what it is, what it does, what it means, and why someone should care, and put that on one sheet of paper.
Speaker 1Yeah, I'd agree with that. You see, you uh yeah, I've got a a deck to look at, and you know, a company that's looking for looking for investors at the minute. And if you drill into it, and you know, I I can kind of get my head around some of this techno-babble stuff. If you drill into it, it's actually not a bad idea. But the way in which they've presented it, in my opinion, is just dreadful. Yes, you know, I can only just deduce what it is that they're trying to do, and I'm in that world. You know, if you put that to somebody in front of somebody who, you know, hadn't been immersed in the world of tech for the 25 years of their life and and isn't a geek like me.
Speaker 2These these are the conversations that I have with leadership teams because I get presented with these sorts of things, and I it's like, so what is it exactly that you're doing here? And I said, by the way, I'm asking that in an authentic way because I can't figure this out. Yeah, you know, I see these things all the time and have for long periods of time. What is the average, you know, what is the person outside who you know is going along just fine in life, by the way, before you came along? Uh, what are they to think of this?
Speaker 1Yeah, the average Joe on the street or whatever the phrase is.
Speaker 2Yeah, and so so you know, you you you see what I call Gen 2, particularly in software, what I call generation two companies that are particularly adept at simplifying value propositions so that people can understand them. Slack, perfect example, right? Is Slack a game changer? I don't think so, right? I mean, I uh virtually every client that I go into uses Slack. They always try to put me on it, and it's like I don't want to be disturbed, thank you very much. I'm not, I don't need to be in every conversation. Um, but you know, what was the premise behind Slack? Email sucks. Yeah, so why not just have a running conversation? Okay, fine, right? Yeah. Um, Shopify, uh, companies like this, Twilio, companies like this have just really extraordinarily simple, what they do is quite complicated in a way, but yeah, they have very simple ways of explaining themselves. And we still in the tech industry, you know, we look in a mirror and think we're looking through a window. Yeah. And that just doesn't um uh it it it it's it doesn't end well when people can't get out of that.
Speaker 1But I've all I I've always said to me, it seems to be the mark of high intelligence if you can explain a complicated and particularly technological concept to somebody who doesn't have that background in simple terms, crisply and concisely. And you know, I think the same is true from a from a company standpoint. You get a win if you can get your message over quickly. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2Reductionism is a wonderful thing.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. Yeah I agree. Just before we started, I had a sales pitch email into me. And it doesn't actually say what it is that we're he's selling in the in the email. You know, I'm gonna have to dig into a PDF and have a look at it and try and work out what it is that he's pitching to me. And you know, can I be bothered? Yeah, yeah, really interesting.
Speaker 2So companies have so many, so many features and benefits, and we as individuals have so little time and interest in finding what those things are.
Speaker 1Widgets and gadgets and yeah, whiz whiz bangs, whiz bangs that we used to call it. The IT security in industry is terrible for whiz bangs. You know, we've invented a new thing, a new a new whiz bang. Because the Adam Luca, our chief technologist for security at SoftCat, he coined that expression where they that you know they invent a new widget that solves a problem that nobody knew that they needed before, and off you off you go and build a half a billion dollar company off it.
Speaker 2Well, and and and that's one of the things that is that is um you asked what's changed in the industry, this what we call this digital transformation, you know, 2.0. What we have done, particularly in the IT industry, is that um for years, decades, we sold people layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of stuff. And all of this was predicated on having it, you know. I've got it in my, you know, my IT room, and I've got you know, all the way down from semiconductors all the way up through, you know, little tiny applications that we're using on our PC. And these are just layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of stuff. And people don't want more layers. What they're doing now is they're shedding those layers, and they're saying, literally, going back to the idea that was first postulated, I will get I will provision information technology by plugging something into the wall or pulling it down out of the air. And that's what I want. I'm gonna let other people take care of all of the, as you mentioned, Sam, all of the whiz banks. And I will subscribe to that service, and of course, that's called AWS and Azure and Google Cloud and what have you. And that is what people want. They don't want all of these other things, they want to detach from this, and well, they should.
Speaker 1Yeah, makes sense. So Paces Change is faster than ever. How do organizations keep agility in these crazy times?
Speaker 2Well, I think it comes back to to what what, at least for me, and I'm I'm partly an organizational expert, but um, but my experience has been that when people are really built around a common purpose, when they understand that common purpose, when they are allowed to work to that common purpose, and are able to align with their colleagues, not in an inauthentic way, or not in a way that is like, okay, it's alignment time. We have to go have an alignment off-site. Um, and I, you know, Vicky, I'm sure you've seen this all the time. You know, we have to go, we have to go align now because uh we're unaligned. So the idea of aligning around purpose, uh, there's lots of different ways of getting there, but aligning around purpose, cause, philosophy as to why we're in service to something or why we're in service to others. Those are the meta-aligning principles that I see that really make the difference between organizations that know what they're doing, know what they're about, and confident in their pursuit of that, and organizations that are still kind of you know shaking their heads back and forth, um, uh almost almost reactive to a fault, or are artificially, well, we can't do anything because we're not aligned. I mean, I I I will, you know, I've heard that from several big companies who stress that we can't really make progress on this because we're not aligned. Yeah, yeah. And so alignment is looked at as a an event rather than as a continuous process.
VicYeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, I've been it just made me think, I've been working with a leadership team, and the alignment piece has come down to so there's a new MD and last year they had 26 priorities. And they deliver they presented them to the organization. And when I did the company-wide survey to see they people were, I I I likened it to they wanted to be um empowered, I likened it to they were like on a dog lead, you know, those dog leads that stretched.
Speaker 4Yeah, that's right.
VicAnd then and then they'd get to a point where it would choke them back because they'd all got these competing priorities. And actually, my day has been made today because I've been working with this leadership team and they have reduced their number of priorities down to four and they presented them. And what we needed to do from an alignment perspective is we needed to get the leadership team. So whether it was about culture or whether it was about building an omnichannel, I needed the person that was talking about omni-channel to be able to talk about culture in the same way. So they're all talking the same language. And I I I heard from somebody today that had been on the receiving end of this, and the feedback has just been we know what's expected of us this year, and they haven't got competing priorities.
Speaker 2Yeah.
VicJust music to my ears.
Speaker 2Yeah, no, I I one of my one of my partners is extraordinarily good at this, uh, is you know, putting a leadership team in a room um and building building a strategy with more of a facilitated strategy session, but he doesn't let them out of the room unless they all agree on what they're gonna do.
Speaker 4Yeah.
Speaker 2And it in in in some ways, he's he's like the you know, the head master of the school.
Speaker 4Yeah.
Speaker 2And he he he does it in a in a very, very um, I should say, gentle yet effective way. Yeah, yeah. Of taking, you know, ostensibly very headstrong leadership members of a leadership team and getting them to say, okay, yeah, we'll we'll do this. The other the other the other side of it that we see is you know this alignment. We were working with a client where we we made them trace from the time an order comes in, what are all the steps that happen before their customer actually gets use, not just receives the product, but gets use out of it. And put this up on a whiteboard, and CEO looks at that and says, Oh my god, we have created a monster, yeah, you know, all because we, you know, not that there was something wrong with those steps, but every organization had a touch point in this, and they all had to kind of do their stuff. And that kind of comes back to this notion of there was a tremendous amount of context in that process that didn't add any value.
VicYeah, that's a brilliant example. You know, I've just I've just finished reading a book by General Stanley McChrystal about team of teams, and he talks about how you get the different teams to work together. And he was saying about you can have, you know, the Navy SEALs can be completely optimized in what they're doing, but then they weren't working with the intelligence agency and how they got them to to interact and understand and build the trust between the teams. So it's a fascinating area.
Speaker 1As we come towards the end in that context, Sakia, it's probably worth asking Paul what your three key takeaways are, or or your key takeaways at least, even if you don't need and feel you need to give us a full three on how to keep organizations aligned.
Speaker 2Well, I think again, always always coming back to saying what is the purpose of what we're doing? What is the next set of things that we need to do in order to hit three months, six months, nine month, twelve month milestones? Those can be soft, they can be hard, but they have to be realizable and they have to be technical. Tangible to somebody. It's not enough to say, well, we need to make the quarter next quarter. Of course you do. That's why you're being paid. Right? Well, we need to we we you know we need to get this product out. That's why you're being paid. Okay. I mean, you know, if you if you can't get the product out, then something's wrong, you know, in in in the process, and you need to go back and look at that. But absent those things, you know, that's not enough to align around what is our organizing philosophy for the company? What are we attempting to do? Why is that important to do? Why is that important to our customers? Why will they get value out of doing that? And therefore, why is it important that we prosecute it in this particular way? And you know, those are just questions to be raised, just questions to be asked. And in in back into you know, just kind of put a wrap to this when you shoot a 30-second, 45-second, 60-second commercial, that is being shot to a strategy, which has then been storyboarded into a series of vignettes, a script, camera angles, what actors are gonna say, how everything looks. And when when before any of that happens, you will see a variety of different ways to, in a sense, prosecute a particular strategy. And what you're taught is to ask yourself, is this activity on strategy? Okay, is this is is what we're doing, even down to a particular scene, is that on strategy, right? And what's the strategy? Well, I'm I'm old school. The strategy is to sell something. Okay, that's the function of advertising, right? And uh, if you don't believe me, just read any of David Ogilby's books, right? Amen to that. Yeah, and so so you know, people, people, you know, the the Super Bowl just ran in the in the in the States, and and you know, part of it is this this this you know sort of orgy of commercials, and what people spend on these things is unbelievable. And of course, people that a lot of my friends in the still in the ad industry, it's like that's crap, that's awful, that's stupid, that's derivative. Oh, gee celebrities and sports stars saying funny things. Nobody ever thought of that before, right? Most of it is crap because there's no strategy behind it. Right, and that's just you know, that's just kind of taking life and putting it into a 30-second vignette. But somehow we lose that a lot of times in the tech industry, and it it you know, there's not a reason why we should do that. We just don't think about it.
VicIt's joining it all up together, isn't it?
Speaker 1Yeah, indeed. I think that makes sense. So, Vic, in the absence of our dearly beloved Shah.
VicShe's just sent me a message, actually, and she says, Hi, Paul.
Speaker 1Well, there you go. She's almost still on the podcast, popping up, popping up in the middle of it. Um you better take over and uh talk to talk us through Hero Time.
VicI'm not sure I can do it quite as well as Shah, but um we have Hero Time, Paul, because our little emblem at the Amplified Group is a stick man and his name is Hero. And it's not about us being the heroes, it's about making our clients into heroes. So we like to have this little bit at the end of the podcast, just to get an idea from our guests of who their hero is. And we've had such a range from our dog walker to Gandhi to I don't believe in heroes. So it's a it's a wide open question to you, but we're curious.
Speaker 2I don't know that I have a single one, Vic. I I I look at I I look at a lot of people that I think are extraordinary in what they do. Uh I'll I'll be very honest, being being very temporal, at least in this country, if Dr. Anthony Fauci is not awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor at the end of this past year, there is no justice in this world.
unknownYeah.
Speaker 1Is that an American knighthood? It's yes. Yes.
Speaker 2Yeah. But I mean, if if the if the people um uh again, you look at you look at these people are creating an extraordinary difference in the world. You look at the scientists at Sanger Center uh in Britain, uh in Cambridge, you know, what's going on at the CDC right now in the States, uh, Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, but Tony Fauci in particular. The man is 80 years old. He looks younger than I am, and he is on TV every night, and he is just cracker jack smart, and he's my man on the pedestal right now.
VicWell, great example, thank you.
Speaker 2That sounds legitimate.
VicAnd and I know Sam will wrap us up in a minute, but I just want to say thank you so much for for spending the time with us today and and sharing your pearls of wisdom because it's just such an honour and a privilege to to have you on the podcast, Paul.
Speaker 4My pleasure, Vic. Any time.
Speaker 1Absolutely, yeah. Really enjoyed that. It's really good to get that level of insight as always. Really appreciate you uh joining us. And that was fantastic. So it just remains for me to say thank you to our listeners for joining us on Get Amplified from the Gamplified group, your comments and of course your subscriptions gratefully received as always, and we'll see you next time.